Questões de Concurso Público IF-MT 2018 para Português/Inglês

By Emily Willingham on August 30, 2018

In 1995 the late actor Christopher Reeve, who most famously played Superman, became paralyzed from the neck down after a horseback-riding accident. The impact from the fall left him with a complete spinal cord injury at the neck, preventing his brain from communicating with anything below it. Cases like Reeve’s are generally considered intractable injuries, absent any way to bridge the gap to restore disrupted communication lines.When Reeve died in 2004 a means of reconnection had yet to be built. Now, 14 years later, researchers have coaxed nerve cells to span the divide of a complete spinal cord injury. Their findings, described August 29 in Nature, are specific to only one kind of nerve cell and much work remains before a means of reconnection reaches patients, but the results make an impression. [...]

Their first effort failed. They tried dampening the activity of a gene called PTEN because the gambit had worked well with a few other types of nonspinal neurons. To their surprise, that strategy did not succeed with the propriospinal cells. They then turned to a set of chemicals that promote nerve cell growth and trigger production of a well-known structural protein called laminin, widely used in tissue engineering as a scaffold. Some of these growth promoters are active in embryonic development, and adults usually do not make them. Previous efforts to coax axons across an injury gap using so-called growth factors alone had come up empty—failures blamed on other inhibitory chemicals getting in the way.

(Disponível em: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/growth-cocktail-helps-restore-spinal-connections-in-the-most-severe-injuries/, acessado em 02/09/18).

Paradoxically, now that the field of discourse studies has high visibility, the universe from which discourse studies emerged is vanishing. New communication devices subvert the very distinction between orality and writing, and so we have to rethink many categories: textuality, speaker, addressee, utterance, memory, storage, circulation, etc. We can no longer consider technology as just an element of the “context”: it now needs to be considered as a true actor in the communication process. Such a transformation relates to the data – since the Internet offers new kinds of semiotic productions – but also to the very conditions of research, which depend increasingly on sophisticated programs and data bases. The problem is that most discourse analysts seem to live in a world where traditional face-to-face talk is still the norm of communication. If we consider the handbooks and the articles published in the field, a peripheral role is given to corpora produced by new technologies, except if they can be tackled by using the toolkit of Conversation Analysis. This is particularly the case with chats, forums, emails, phone text-messages and so on. As the focus of discourse analysis is not on the most important aspects of the Web, its study belongs mainly to specialists from other fields. The Discourse Reader (Jaworski and Coupland, 1999) does not mention the Internet. But, surprisingly, this is also the case 13 years later in The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis: the introduction does not mention the existence of new communication technologies and none of the 46 chapters deals with this topic.

https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201758, acessado em 25/08/18.